Fisking Christopher A. Ferrara's "The Church and the Libertarian," while delimiting, defining, and defending an Austro-libertarian option for Catholics.

March 7, 2011

A Question of Tone

A musician may have mastered the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic elements of a composition, but if he cannot produce tones of the appropriate timbre and texture, he will undermine rather than promote his purpose.

By contrast, the most banal of tunes in the hands of a great instrumentalist or vocalist might mesmerize millions and have an audience greater than its worth. In an important sense, then, we perceive a performance’s texture “before” (esthetically, not temporally) we hear the notes, so much so that if we don’t like the former, we are biased against the latter. We may consequently misjudge the musical content in which we might have delighted were another to deliver it to our senses.

Sometimes, however, cacophony simply signals the activity of a tone-deaf composer.

No one who has read more than a few pages of Christopher A. Ferrara's The Church and the Libertarian can take it seriously as a “fraternal appeal” to Austro-libertarian Catholics.* Two thorough readings of it have convinced me that it is such a bad book, morally as well as stylistically, that it arguably ought to be ignored rather than critically reviewed.

Its tone is continuously inflammatory, its arrangement of material lopsided (the second section being longer than the first and third combined), and his use of sources tendentious. The last-mentioned trait includes either unawareness or evasion (it’s hard to decide which) of evidence relevant to his topic but inconvenient to his purpose.

Even while rummaging through memories of my Marxist days, a period ranging from thirty-five to forty years ago, I cannot recall ever having encountered between two covers such a barrage of uncharitable construction, sarcasm, gratuitous assertion, name-calling, motive-questioning, playing to the gallery, assumption of facts not in evidence, digressive appeal to unqualified expert opinion, citing overvalued credentials, stereotyping, redefining key terms, abuse of scare-quotes, innuendo, misleading references, and theatrical laughter. I could support this impression with any three consecutive pages of the reader’s choosing. Passages from the writings of Herbert Aptheker in his worst mood rival it, but even that historian-cum-propagandist never sustained his invective for hundreds of pages. (See my “Herbert Aptheker: My Communist Mentor.” )

In other words, reading it will likely be a chore for any one not predisposed to the author’s point of view. The only thing that is clear after more than three hundred pages is that Mr. Ferrara is angry that any Catholic, and especially his erstwhile collaborator Thomas E. Woods, would enter into the thought of Murray Rothbard and allow it to interact with his faith.**

* “. . . however forcefully its arguments are presented in places, is also meant as a fraternal appeal to Catholic proponents of the errors at issue, that they might abandon all error and return to the path the Church has marked out for them and for every soul that seeks true happiness in this world and the next.” (5)

** In a video interview Mr. Ferrara said that both “love for what the Church teaches” and “deep, serious and . . . righteous anger . . . about a certain kind of sophistry that has taken hold of the Church today, the sophistry of the so-called modern libertarian movement and its advocacy of radical laissez faire as the basis for social order” motivated him to write the book under review.” A Lake Garda Interview with Chris Ferrara, July 20, 2010. You Tube.

About This Blog

We defend Austro-libertarianism, both per se and as an option for Catholics, against the misrepresentation of Christopher A. Ferrara's, The Church and the Libertarian: A Defense of the Catholic Church's Teaching on Man, Economy, and State (Forest Lake, MN: The Remnant Press, 2010. iii+383 pp. Foreword by John C. Médaille.) In these posts the book will be referred to as TCATL. Numbers in parenthesis refer to the page(s) quoted from.

Our intended audience consists of

(a) those favorably disposed toward Mr. Ferrara's position, but whose integrity leads them to wonder what might be said against it;

(b) promoters of TCATL, especially certain Catholic academic reviewers of TCATL—for whom the prescription "charity in all things" should have special meaning—but who apparently have forgotten whatever they once may have known about standards of evidence, charitable construction of one's adversary's position, and other elements of the ethics of discourse. If they are satisfied that we have invalidated its evidence and exposed its disgraceful conduct of controversy, we hope they will be moved to retract their ill-considered endorsements of TCATL; and

(c) Austro-libertarians, Catholic or not, who are curious about this book-length attack on their beliefs.

When ancestors of portions of TCATL had appeared ina Catholic newspaper some years ago, we hoped more accomplished Austro-libertarian Catholics would reply. When we approached them about doing so, however, they advised us that that was a waste of time, ours no less than theirs. We are not certain they were wrong.

Apart from this review, promised years ago if the author would herd his farrago of complaints into a book, it is unlikely that the people he’d prefer to engage him in debate will do so. Our exposure of his exercise in illiberal propaganda constitutes probably the closest, if not the only, attention it will get from this side of the fence. On its merits, it deserves a one-sentence dismissal.

We thank the Remnant Press for the review copy they sent upon request, which we defaced with multi-colored highlighters in preparation for this review.

We speak only for ourselves and not for Tom Woods, Jeff Tucker, Lew Rockwell, or any other Austro-libertarian Catholic.